ABSTRACT
The nature of livingness in human life is manifest in language manifest to those whose thought about language is, inseparably, thought about literary creation. The English language in the full sense is alive, or becomes for the creative writer alive, with hints, apprehensions and intuitions. They go back to earlier cultural phases. F. R. Leavis's quarrel with 'philosophy' was that it was unable to provide an account of his experience of language and indeed depended on a kind of principled unawareness of this. In his view, philosophers were constitutionally 'weak on language'. Leavis's belief that academic philosophy could not essentially help his own preoccupation with language was focused most clearly, perhaps, by his relations with Wittgenstein; a matter on which he has left his own record. Leavis's concern with language was as radical as the early Wittgenstein's but quite different in kind. Tactically, then, Leavis insisted on the difference between the critic's and the philosopher's interest in language.
